Bengal SSC scam: High court hears challenge petition, but fate of 803 teachers undecided

Division Bench reserves order; last week, judge asked that steps be taken to cancel appointments of 1,911 Group D school staff

Sougata Mukhopadhyay   |   TT  |  Calcutta   |   13.02.23 : The West Bengal School Service Commission finds no reason to re-examine the Optical Marks Recognition (OMR) sheets -- whose digital records were seized from Ghaziabad by the CBI and sent to the Commission to ascertain recruitment fraud -- or question their authenticity since they were “identical replicas” of the original answer scripts which are now destroyed.

The submission was made by the Commission before the Division Bench of Justices Subrata Talukdar and Supratim Bhattacharya of the Calcutta High Court which kept its order in reserve after concluding the hearing of challenge petitions moved before the court by the aggrieved secondary school teachers whose appointments are all set to be revoked on the basis of an SSC affidavit submitted in court.

Last week, following the Commission’s admission of its “fault”, Justice Abhijit Ganguly set a one-week deadline and directed the SSC to initiate the termination process of 803 currently-employed teachers of classes IX and X whose appointments were given back in 2017 by means of answer script result manipulation. The plea of these teachers to be added as a party to the case and be allowed to defend themselves in court was rejected by Justice Biswajit Basu. Challenging both orders, the litigants moved the Division Bench and argued their case before the judges on Monday.

Based on the same SSC affidavit, Justice Ganguly has already passed an order on Friday to take appropriate steps to cancel appointments of 1911 Group D staff in schools whose OMR sheet results were found tampered with. Both SSC and the state secondary education board have subsequently notified the termination. The appeal petition against that order could not be heard by the Division Bench on Monday since the Single Bench order was yet to be uploaded on the court’s Website.

In September last year the CBI, which is probing the SCC recruitment scam on the Calcutta High Court’s orders, had seized hard disks containing digital records of the 2017 TET exam from the Ghaziabad office of NYSA Communications Pvt Ltd, which was among the companies responsible for OMR sheet evaluation. Although the Commission has, by its own protocol, already destroyed the original OMR sheets of the candidates in question a year of the exams were conducted, the CBI argued in court that the OMR records seized from Ghaziabad vastly differed from the digital records recovered from the Commission’s office in Salt Lake, Kolkata and that a large number of candidates had their marks enhanced in the latter. The commission accepted its “mistake” under an oath before the court, identified 952 such candidates out of which 803 are employed for over five years now, and recommended that the appointments under question be cancelled.

Counsels for aggrieved teachers argued that the Commission based its conclusion on “secondary evidence” since the original documents have been destroyed which should bring the basis of comparison of the records under judicial scrutiny. The principles of natural justice and civil consequences of the job-losers must be kept in mind and the Commission should be directed not to proceed any further on its termination process under Rule 17 of the Commission’s Act till all stakeholders are heard by the court.

“Destruction of the original documents doesn’t make the evidence weak since they were mirror images of the original ones with no scope of human intervention. We have sufficient grounds to believe that mistakes were made,” Dr Sutanu Patra, appearing for the Commission submitted and added there was no scope of hearing the eliminated candidates as per SSC rules.

“The Commission may have destroyed the original OMR sheets but they have scanned digital copies of the same in their records which have been retrieved from their server,” Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, advocate, pitched in.

It would be interesting to observe whether the Commission, which is still bound by the Single Bench deadline of 15 February to officially notify the sacking of teachers since the higher court has not granted any stay on the Justice Ganguly’s order so far, goes ahead and publishes the list like it did for the Group D employees or whether it decides to wait for the Division Bench order to be passed before it takes the next step.